tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21152588282686047462019-02-01T15:23:27.209+00:00Brush on Drum<i>(mostly)</i>
serious writing
<i>(mostly)</i>
about musicPhilip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-60210408247067156142017-08-17T10:19:00.000+01:002017-08-17T10:44:19.183+01:00David Bowie<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OOeExerRG4Y/WZVeMosPu6I/AAAAAAAAAzo/3NLtqC2kYBEkWn5avfQH3RtEUIWzCKrXQCLcBGAs/s1600/zzZiggy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OOeExerRG4Y/WZVeMosPu6I/AAAAAAAAAzo/3NLtqC2kYBEkWn5avfQH3RtEUIWzCKrXQCLcBGAs/s320/zzZiggy.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>UPPING YOUR ZIGGY: HOW DAVID BOWIE FACED HIS CHILDHOOD DEMONS – AND HOW YOU CAN FACE YOURS</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Oliver James</div><div class="MsoNormal">(KARNAC) www.karnacbooks.com </div><div class="MsoNormal">ISBN 978-1-7822049-0-9 Softcover. 192 pp.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This is a tale of two half-brothers. One of them, Terry, became schizophrenic and committed suicide. The other, David, reinvented himself and became one of the biggest rock stars of the last fifty years. There was a history of mental illness in the family – three maternal aunts also went mad – and a toxic legacy of shared childhood from which David emerged as the favoured son and Terry as the emotionally neglected sibling.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">James’s book is part psychobiography and part self-help manual. The author is a practising therapist and a firm believer in ‘nurture’ over ‘nature’. Genes play little part in determining who we are, he says: childhood adversity causes psychosis, not genes. Believing his family cursed by madness, Bowie avoided the same fate for himself by inventing ‘personas’ – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke – and playing them out on the public stage until he reached a state of psychic equilibrium in midlife and made peace with himself. This is a model, James argues, for how we can all develop a dialogue between different parts of the self and reintegrate them, producing new personas and pushing old ones into the background.<br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">James began writing his book before Bowie’s untimely death in 2016, so he cannot be accused of ‘cashing in’. He traces effectively how Terry’s experiences surface in his brother’s lyrics and how personas, Ziggy in particular, enabled ‘David Bowie’ (another assumed identity) to reconnect with David Jones (his birth name). I was less convinced by James’s efforts to turn Bowie’s psychodrama into everyone’s struggle to keep it together. Many of us find something to identify with in Bowie – be it the sense of alienation, the gender-variance, the self-questioning, the restless need like the whale shark’s to keep swimming in order to stay alive. But there was only one Ziggy.</span></div><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot; , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot;;">[First published in&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot;;"><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">RnR</a>]&nbsp;</span><br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-74687224075059203272017-03-05T15:16:00.000+00:002017-03-05T15:29:35.584+00:00Laura Nyro<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JWpk5goMKaY/WLwmxSnHL8I/AAAAAAAAAzU/WvHda_h8UJk5JJKTiHSuUkOJq_FXT16xACLcB/s1600/zzEli.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JWpk5goMKaY/WLwmxSnHL8I/AAAAAAAAAzU/WvHda_h8UJk5JJKTiHSuUkOJq_FXT16xACLcB/s320/zzEli.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Revisiting <i>Eli and the Thirteenth Confession</i> (1968)</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There was soul, gospel, Brill Building pop, Motown, doo-wop, the jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, a touch of Broadway, even a hint of opera. It was a frantic synthesis of so many of the styles I was coming to appreciate. I never expected to find them together in one place, and the mystery was compounded when I found them in someone about as far removed from my nerdy suburban self as it was possible to get. Laura Nyro was a feisty Italian-American from the Bronx, of mixed Jewish-Catholic background. But it is to her that I owe my lifelong passion for women singer-songwriters.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’d probably encountered her before without even realising it. Her earliest songs were picked up by other artists. I remember Pan’s People on <i>Top Of The Pops</i>, a vision in white polyester, applying their painfully literal choreography to ‘Wedding Bell Blues’, a hit for The 5<sup>th</sup> Dimension in 1969. Then an older brother bought <i>The Rock Machine I Love You</i>, a CBS sampler that included ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’, and I had my first exposure to Nyro’s own voice. Alternately soothing and shrill, ranging unfettered over several octaves, it was not quite of this world. Of course, I had to have the album from which this track was drawn. &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Nothing, I discovered, about <i>Eli And The Thirteenth Confession</i> was conventional. Famously, the original US pressing used perfumed ink on the lyric sheet, enabling Nyro’s college fans to identify each other by smelling its lingering aroma in each other’s dorms. No such luck with my UK copy. And some olfactory prompts would have been useful, for I never met anyone else who shared my taste, or even knew how to pronounce her name correctly (think “Nero”, like the Roman emperor). <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The lyrics were obscure but poetic (“<i>Silver was the colour | Winter was a snowbell | Mother of the windboys | Livin’ off the lovewell</i>”). Sometimes she just made words up: “Surry <i>down to a stoned soul picnic</i>”. Humpty Dumpty tells Lewis Carroll’s Alice that words mean whatever he chooses them to mean: this seemed to be Nyro’s position likewise. I envied her for getting away with it. At other times a line of pellucid simplicity would jump out at you: “<i>Emily, you ornament the earth | For me</i>”. Her world was peopled by larger-than-life characters, God, the Devil, someone she called ‘The Captain’. Later in life, her music loosened up (to its detriment, in my view) and she’d refer to this early work as “a little crazy”, but to a young man ill at ease in his own skin it was a revelation.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There were celebrations of alcohol (‘Sweet Blindness’) and a cautionary tale about drug abuse (‘Poverty Train’). I suspected that the concerted whole was a song-cycle about coming of age. For a teenage boy grappling with the “facts of life”, she seemed to allude to dark secrets. The invitation on the final track to “<i>super ride inside my lovething</i>” was the most explicit proposal I was likely to hear all year. Present throughout was an inescapable theme of neediness, of dependence on a man, but on first exposure my antennae were barely attuned to other hints in the lyrics. When Nyro's bisexuality was finally confirmed in the obituaries, there were murmurs of “I told you so” as fans looked back to ‘Emmie’, a track on this early album infused with a near-romantic intensity.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Released in March 1968, when she was only twenty, <i>Eli</i> is a work of astonishing maturity. Later, as I learned more about her, I understood that the artistry went even deeper than I’d realised. Having transferred from her original label and won the support of David Geffen, she was given unprecedented creative control by Columbia. The careful sequencing of tracks across the two sides of the LP was hers. She insisted on accompanying herself on piano at a time when girls were supposed to be singers, not instrumentalists. The abrupt tempo changes and weird jazz voicings of her piano style were left unregulated. It would fall to others to make her songs hits by smoothing out their contours, simplifying the harmony – Nyro stuck to her guns. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What I realise now – but barely intuited at the time – is that this album lies at a cusp of Sixties music, a time when women were transitioning from singer with the band or soloist performing songs written by professional (usually male) songwriters to the empowered singer-songwriter figure who emerges at the end of the decade. We think of Carole King, and Joni Mitchell. But it’s no accident that Laura Nyro is the only female songwriter that Joni Mitchell namechecks with reverence.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p>She did one concert on British television, in 1971. Somehow I missed that – probably doing my homework – which is a crying shame, as the BBC, with customary disregard for my feelings, has since wiped all but seventeen seconds of the video master. I never did get to see her live. Alas, she died of ovarian cancer in 1997, but she lives on inside me and inside all those whose lives she has touched.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" target="_blank">R2 (Rock'n'Reel)</a></i></span></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-27902085585886727522017-01-23T14:30:00.001+00:002017-01-23T14:35:47.825+00:00John Lennon in Bermuda<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qr3q3nKCw-o/WIYTCmHcz1I/AAAAAAAAAzA/-g8xEmBTZ_Et9RNTw2B-b7Jlt7b_414SACLcB/s1600/zzLennonBermuda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="319" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qr3q3nKCw-o/WIYTCmHcz1I/AAAAAAAAAzA/-g8xEmBTZ_Et9RNTw2B-b7Jlt7b_414SACLcB/s320/zzLennonBermuda.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>LENNON BERMUDA<br /></b>Scott Neil and Graham Foster<br />(FREISENBRUCH BRANNON) www.doublefantasybermuda.com<br />ISBN 978-1927750-02-5 Softcover. 120 pp.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The summer before his death, <a href="http://brushondrum.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/john-lennon.html" target="_blank">John Lennon</a> hired a 43-foot yacht and, with a small crew, sailed to Bermuda for a little R&amp;R. Arriving after a storm-tossed passage, he rented a house on the island and reconnected with his muse. The result was his final album, <i>Double Fantasy</i>, named after a freesia he spotted on a visit to the local botanical gardens.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s hard to believe there’s any cranny of Lennon’s life that hasn’t been picked over, but journalist Scott Neil has found one of the less-explored and tracked down those he met in Bermuda. The Lennon recalled by islanders was not the self-obsessed star they expected. He was polite, laid-back, into healthy eating and clean living. A generous, companionable man who returned favours and remembered kindnesses shown him. After five years out of the limelight, he relished going incognito as ‘John Greene’ and rewarded those who respected his privacy. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The book’s style is a little feverish at the outset, as the “former Beatle” battles crashing waves, alone at the helm against a “storm of Shakespearean proportions”. But once the prose settles down, the story is well-told and the reminiscences deftly woven into a highly readable narrative. It’s a tale about negotiating celebrity and finding the quietude to write. Songs like ‘Beautiful Boy’ and ‘Watching The Wheels’ – Neil shows how both were inspired by events in Bermuda – may not be Lennon’s greatest but they fulfil his aim of writing for people of his own age group.<o:p></o:p></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The sensitive artwork is by Bermudian artist Graham Foster, who also designed the memorial sculpture to Lennon in the Bermuda Botanical Gardens. Best of all are the scattered photos of the singer, some with son Sean in tow. He looks relaxed, like a man ‘starting over’ (another song-title), blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" target="_blank">R2 (Rock'n'Reel)</a></i></span></span><br /><br />Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-70976332155610777422016-12-05T11:33:00.000+00:002016-12-05T11:33:20.449+00:00Alan McClure<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-as3Waf_QK6Y/WEVOURtmfVI/AAAAAAAAAyk/s5FTz1OW3BYSlcXj4-zLJ7nWuRFTjCpEQCLcB/s1600/zzAlanMcClure.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-as3Waf_QK6Y/WEVOURtmfVI/AAAAAAAAAyk/s5FTz1OW3BYSlcXj4-zLJ7nWuRFTjCpEQCLcB/s320/zzAlanMcClure.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><b><br /></b><b>Everything Is Fine (Until </b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>It's Not)</b> (LOST WASP RECORDS, 2014, CD)</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.alanmcclure.co.uk/" target="_blank"><br /></a></span><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.alanmcclure.co.uk/" target="_blank">Alan McClure</a> is a man to watch. A 36 year-old from south-west Scotland, he first crossed my radar as lead singer and chief songwriter to quirky combo <a href="http://brushondrum.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-razorbills.html" target="_blank">The Razorbills</a>. Now he arrives with a solo album, confirming his status as a profoundly <i>interesting</i>writer. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Here he’s backed by The Mountain Sound Session. According to the press release, they “comprise some of Hull’s finest musicians”, and I’m inclined to believe it. Most of the songs sit on a bed of sensitive two-guitar arrangements, McClure’s own fingerpicking blending with Dave Gawthorpe’s classical guitar. The arrangements never overwhelm the voice.<o:p></o:p></div><span style="font-family: &quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span> <span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As ever, McClure’s lyrics take you to unexpected places. ‘Ugandan Sun’ remoulds a folk motif about forbidden love, complete with recurring refrain line, to skewer the state-sponsored homophobia of a certain African nation. The title track is full of his trademark verbal dexterity: statements are advanced, qualified, withdrawn, forcing you to attend to what the man’s saying. But he does easy tunefulness as well. ‘The Notion’ has a relaxed Laurel Canyon vibe, harking back like much of his music to the 1960s, while ‘Rant’ ironically updates Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ to the context of Glasgow dockyards and the ‘empty Highland’.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;">First published in</span><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;">&nbsp;<i>R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</i></a><span style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;">.&nbsp;</span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-1929182616830904572016-11-19T14:37:00.000+00:002016-11-19T14:37:52.905+00:00Peter Gabriel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WMaBMZlSLq0/WDBijat9s9I/AAAAAAAAAyQ/Ft6RCyPrltgUlGPCMnTi7h-qqMALO6jLQCLcB/s1600/zzGabriel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WMaBMZlSLq0/WDBijat9s9I/AAAAAAAAAyQ/Ft6RCyPrltgUlGPCMnTi7h-qqMALO6jLQCLcB/s320/zzGabriel.jpg" width="225" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Growing Up Live/Still Growing Up Live &amp; Unwrapped</b> (3 DVDs)<br />(EAGLE ROCK) www.petergabriel.com<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The voice has aged, raspier in its lower register than in his Genesis days. But as the (mostly young) audiences chant “PETER! PETER!” we’re reminded that only a couple of letters separate the showman from the shaman. “<i>My friends would think I was a nut / Turning water into wine</i>,” he sings in ‘Solsbury Hill’, as he rides round the stage on a folding bike.&nbsp; Peter Gabriel may not be a miracle-worker but he is still a hugely charismatic presence.<br /><br />These DVDs (predominantly reissued material) record the tours following the release of his album <i>Up</i>. The most spectacular is a 2003 Milan gig, where the band perform on a revolving stage in mid-arena. Aided by designer Robert Lepage, Gabriel’s love of spectacle is undiminished. He hangs upside down from an elevated set in ‘Downside Up’, perambulates the stage in a zorb ball for ‘Growing Up’ as if suspended in amniotic fluid. Close-ups of Gabriel’s penetrating eyes are intercut with shots of orange-clad techies toiling like Nibelungs beneath the stage. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The 2004 gigs find Gabriel introducing the songs in French. The theatricals are toned down, the setlist different. As the previous year, daughter Melanie joins on backing vocals and there is a touching moment as father and daughter hold hands in ‘Come Talk To Me’. But the finest cut here is on the DVD ‘extras’: a joyous duet on ‘In Your Eyes’ with Mauritanian Daby Touré.<o:p></o:p></div><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot; , &quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span> <span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The band is tight, with long-serving guitarist David Rhodes a stand-out, and sound quality excellent.</span></span><br /><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/">R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</a></i></span></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-55084015318811487002016-05-01T14:56:00.000+01:002016-05-01T14:56:02.594+01:00Hofmannsthal poems<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6zqd8wmC674/VyYKKiDmeaI/AAAAAAAAAx4/W85rLUnvUHIiF1QpjACKoc6eyhOTn5PDQCLcB/s1600/zzHofmannsthal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6zqd8wmC674/VyYKKiDmeaI/AAAAAAAAAx4/W85rLUnvUHIiF1QpjACKoc6eyhOTn5PDQCLcB/s320/zzHofmannsthal.jpg" width="176" /></a></div><br />Dredged up from an old computer disk – my clumsy efforts from the 1990s to English three poems by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) written a century earlier. If memory serves, the occasion was the possible publication by Carcanet Press of a volume of Hofmannsthal’s verse. Michael Schmidt, Carcanet’s editorial director, was unimpressed by my locutions, rightly suspecting that Michael Hamburger would have done it so much better. The poems are ‘Manche freilich…’ (1895), ‘Die Beiden’ (1896) and ‘Über Vergänglichkeit’ (1894).<br /><br /><br />SOME THERE ARE...<br /><br />Some there are who must perish below,<br />Where the weighty oars of the galleys scour,<br />Others dwell aloft by the helm,<br />Know the flight of birds and the resort of stars.<br /><br />Some will always lie with heavy limbs<br />Among the roots of tangled life,<br />While for others places are set<br />With the sibyls, the empresses,<br />And there they will sit as if at home,<br />Light heads on lighter shoulders.<br /><br />But a shadow falls from those lives<br />Across into the other lives,<br />And the light are bound to the heavy<br />As the air and earth are bound:<br /><br />Weariness of quite-forgotten peoples<br />I cannot dismiss from my eyelids,<br />Nor ward off from my terrified soul<br />The silent fall of distant stars.<br /><br />Many fates are woven next to mine,<br />Existence merges all of them in play,<br />And my part is more than this life’s<br />Slender flame or narrow lyre.<br /><br /><br />THE COUPLE<br /><br />She held the goblet in one hand<br />-- Her mouth and chin were like its rim --<br />So light and certain was her gait<br />No droplet from the glass escaped.<br /><br />So light and firm was his command:<br />He rode upon a sprightly horse,<br />And with a single careless gesture<br />Brought it, quivering, to a stop.<br /><br />And yet, when it was time for him<br />To take the dainty vessel from her,<br />Its weight defied their joint attempt:<br /><br />For both of them were trembling so<br />That neither found the other’s hand<br />And ruby wine spilt on the ground.<br /><br /><br />ON TRANSITORINESS<br /><br />Upon my cheeks I feel still their breath:<br />How can it be that these so recent days<br />Are gone, gone for ever, as if in death?<br /><br />This is a thing that no one fully knows,<br />Beyond lament, too dreadful to erase:<br />That everything glides by us, ebbs and flows.<br /><br />And that my own self, quite unbound, appeared<br />Gliding out from a little child and rose<br />Towards me silent, like a dog, and weird.<br /><br />A hundred years ago I too was there<br />And my forebears, asleep in shrouds, are near<br />To me, akin as I to my own hair,<br /><br />As one with me as I with my own hair.<br /><div><br /></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-35480623502565441922016-04-11T11:22:00.000+01:002016-04-11T11:22:04.203+01:00Rupert Brooke<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y9GjtAy3RDM/Vwt5oUAMgWI/AAAAAAAAAxo/2wJ3_zD6c18W1e6mpLPWf25m9HlwTLEaA/s1600/RupertBrooke.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y9GjtAy3RDM/Vwt5oUAMgWI/AAAAAAAAAxo/2wJ3_zD6c18W1e6mpLPWf25m9HlwTLEaA/s320/RupertBrooke.jpg" width="256" /></a></div><br />Last year, among so many solemn centenaries of the First World War, we remembered the ill-fated Gallipoli landings – part of a campaign, intended to knock the Ottoman Turks out of the war, which cost the lives of so many British and Empire servicemen. The soldier-poet Rupert Brooke never made it to the landings. Bound for the Dardanelles, his troop ship was moored off the Greek island of Skyros when he developed septicaemia from an insect bite and died. He is buried on the island. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Rupert Brooke, “the handsomest young man in England” in the opinion of WB Yeats, has become a poster-boy for the Lost Generation.&nbsp; His Cambridgeshire connections are well-known. In 1909 he took lodgings in Grantchester in a former farmhouse called The Orchard (doubling as a tea room even then) before moving next door to The Old Vicarage a couple of years later. Early in 1912, frustrated in love and thwarted in his bid for a Fellowship at King’s College, he suffered some form of nervous breakdown. Recuperation abroad was recommended, and in May we find him in the Café des Westens in Berlin, seated at a table by the window, reminiscing about his skinny dips in Byron’s Pool:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">Here I am, sweating, sick, and hot,<br />And there the shadowed waters fresh<br />Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, from which these lines come, has become one of his most famous poems, a deft combination of nostalgia, luxuriant language and whimsy that stays just this side of sentimentality. Or so I would argue. George Orwell was less impressed: <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’, the star poem of 1913, is nothing but an enormous gush of ‘country’ sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem ‘Grantchester’ is something worse than worthless but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period <i>felt</i> it is a valuable document. [<i>Inside the Whale</i> (1940).]<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">My impression is that Orwell was a sensitive reader of other writers. As a thinker of the Left, he was naturally suspicious of writers who didn’t share his politics, but he was also a big enough critic to appreciate literary quality wherever it surfaced. If he didn’t find literary quality, he still recognised that a writer could be read historically as a voice of his time – which seems to be his approach to Brooke. The long, nuanced essay he wrote on Kipling shows all these strategies in play. Conversely, a writer could be on the same side of the political fence as Orwell but still be chastised for irresponsibility. A few pages after his comment on Brooke in ‘Inside the Whale’, he takes a pop at Auden. In Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ there’s a reference to “necessary murder”. Orwell doubts that Auden had seen murder at first hand: “Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled”. Yet, overall, Orwell declares the poem to be “one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war”.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">But I digress. Back to Brooke’s poem and his “accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names”. As a Cambridgeshire resident of twenty years standing, I’m perhaps more attentive to these place names than Orwell was (he was living in Hertfordshire in early 1940 when his essay appeared). <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Brooke’s strategy is first to contrast England, where an “unofficial rose” blooms under an “unregulated sun”, where feet may trespass on the grass, with the Teutonic passion for order and regulation:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; text-indent: 36.0pt;">… and there are<br />Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton<br />Where <i>das</i> <i>Betreten</i>’s not <i>verboten</i>.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Then he narrows his focus to tell us why, of all Cambridgeshire villages, he prefers “the lovely hamlet Grantchester”. By contrast, he says,<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">… Barton men make Cockney rhymes,<br />And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,<br />And things are done you’d not believe<br />At Madingley on Christmas Eve.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the margin of the manuscript Brooke wrote a list of villages to be worked into the poem. Comberton was on the list but didn’t make the final cut, being replaced by Trumpington. Denis Cheason, in his book <i>The Cambridgeshire of Rupert Brooke</i>, suggests that Brooke may not even have visited all the places he mentions. In any case, we locals are not to take offence:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">To those of you who are residents of the villages, do not be dismayed by Rupert Brooke’s comments. He was only joking, or perhaps belittling neighbouring villages to highlight the Grantchester which he loved.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">No offence is taken, for the choice of names is very obviously driven by the rhyme scheme: “Coton/<i>verboten</i>”, “rhymes/crimes”. But could there be any more behind it? In her slim volume on the history of The Old Vicarage, Mary Archer concedes that the place names “appear to have been chosen more for convenient scansion than for any accurate local allusion”. However, she goes on to suggest possible, if far-fetched, sources for the references to Barton and Madingley. &nbsp;For Barton she quotes the anonymous ballad ‘The Knocking Ghosts of Barton’, which is almost in the same octosyllabic metre as Brooke’s poem:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">Jiminy, criminy, what a lark,<br />You must not stir out after dark,<br />For if you do you’ll get a mark –<br />From this knocking ghost of Barton.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">And of Madingley it is said that, in the late nineteenth century, a Rector of High Church leanings promised the villagers a High Mass on Christmas Eve. The squire forbade his tenants to attend but they went, defiantly, and were turned out of their homes on Christmas Day. It’s the sort of story that might have appealed to Brooke, had it come to his ears. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">But neither Mary Archer nor Francis Burkitt and Christine Jennings, in their book <i>Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester</i>, have any suggestions for Coton. &nbsp;Another work, <i>Coton Through the Ages</i> (Kathleen Fowle and others, 2013), lists a number of crimes and misdemeanours over the centuries – at least one case of arson and a fair bit of sheep-rustling – but I don’t see anything likely to tickle the fancy of the “handsomest young man in England”.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>So do these place names go down in the annals of literature merely as handy rhymes? As “accumulated vomit”? Or are we missing a trick here?Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-16949367160023938622015-10-30T15:36:00.001+00:002017-04-22T10:42:56.683+01:00Franziska zu Reventlow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p5fbAuHBNcU/VjONFV9T7gI/AAAAAAAAAvs/DfrDfO7ezDs/s1600/Reventlow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p5fbAuHBNcU/VjONFV9T7gI/AAAAAAAAAvs/DfrDfO7ezDs/s320/Reventlow.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Her dates are exactly those of Bismarck’s Reich, and her life was one long protest against it. Countess Franziska (‘Fanny’) zu Reventlow was born in Husum in northern Germany in 1871 and died in Locarno in 1918. Born into a conservative and aristocratic family – her sister became a nun and two of her brothers were members of the German Parliament – she waged a fierce struggle against her parents throughout her adolescence. The first intellectual scene of this rebellion was her secret visits to the Lübeck Ibsen Club, where she encountered free thinkers who propounded artistic and sexual liberation. On her twenty-first birthday she finally ran away from home and her strange quest for self-fulfilment began in earnest. She danced at Carnival in a Pierrot costume. She paid house calls, whip in hand, as a dominatrix. She took acting lessons and played soubrette parts; more strikingly, she appeared as a rope dancer at south German country fairs. All the time she dreamed of a circus life, envying Frank Wedekind his attachment to the Herzog Circus. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After moving to Munich, then artistic capital of Germany, she tried to become a painter, but in fact supported herself by writing, first translations from the French, then satirical sketches, and finally novels. A brief marriage to a Hamburg assessor ended in divorce – her outrageous behaviour, he said, was ruining his career and good name – and disinheritance by her family. The birth in 1897 of her illegitimate son Rolf (she kept his father’s identity secret, saying she had given herself the child) caused chronic gynaecological problems but did not slow her erotic or literary schedule. Determined to save him from the German schools system, she educated him at home. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">For the next fifteen years she was a central figure in Schwabing, then as now Munich’s bohemian quarter, and acted out the ideas which were common currency in its cafes – defiance of bourgeois convention and promotion of sexual freedom. In particular, she embodied the newly fashionable cult of <i>Mutterrecht</i>, the belief that there had been an older and better civilisation based on women’s rights, women’s religion and women-centred families. Her lovers were many: though constantly broke, she always managed to get rich men to pay her way to such places as Constantinople and Corfu. Her circle of acquaintance was huge: in addition to Wedekind (whose 1912 play <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Franziska-Absolute-classics-Frank-Wedekind/dp/1840020822" target="_blank">Franziska</a></i>is loosely based on her career), it included Rainer Maria Rilke (‘every morning a poem in my letterbox’, she noted with pleasure) and Max Weber (through whose intercession she contrived to have her son exempted from military service). <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In 1906, at the home of Otto Gross the maverick psychoanalyst, she met Frieda Weekley, the later Frieda Lawrence, who thought she ‘had the face of a very young Madonna’. Reventlow is thus one of the conduits by which the philosophy of Schwabing penetrates English literature: DH Lawrence portrays her in <i>Mr Noon</i>. When she left Schwabing for the artists’ colony of Ascona in 1910, it was to enter into a farcical marriage for money with a Russian baron – an erstwhile pirate, so he claimed – whose family would only release his inheritance on the condition that he married an aristocrat. No sooner had the newly-weds divided their spoils than they lost it all in a bank collapse. She died as she had so often lived – penniless.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Reventlow was not a political feminist. Distancing herself from the women’s movement in an essay of 1899 (‘Viragines or Hetaerae’), she defined herself as a ‘hetaera’ (roughly speaking, a ‘free woman’). She wanted women to have control of their bodies, which she had fought for in her own life. Financial independence interested her less. But in her writings, as in her life, she experimented with alternative ways of life both within and outside the patriarchal society of the Wilhelmine era.<o:p></o:p></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">None of her work is available in English. Perhaps it should be? Candidates for translation include the clearly autobiographical novel <i>Ellen Olestjerne</i>, the anarchic comic fiction <a href="http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/fileadmin/user_upload/forum/pdf2015/forum_englisch/E_Der_Geldkomplex.pdf" target="_blank"><i>The Money Complex</i></a>&nbsp;(recently filmed by Spanish director Juan Rodrigáñez) and the set of ‘amouresques’ <i>From Paul to Pedro</i>, as well as the wide-ranging&nbsp;<i>Letters</i>and <i>Diaries</i>.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-74697403088816503532015-10-03T10:06:00.000+01:002015-10-03T10:06:39.742+01:00Steve Logan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LhysBaNwc3s/Vg-YexcSrzI/AAAAAAAAAvc/59VQOoMYrpw/s1600/SLogan.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LhysBaNwc3s/Vg-YexcSrzI/AAAAAAAAAvc/59VQOoMYrpw/s320/SLogan.JPG" width="319" /></a></div><b><br /></b><b>Deliverance </b>(MOONDRAGON, 2015, CD)<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Steve Logan, a Welsh singer-songwriter long resident in England, may have lost the accent but not the power to project. <i>Deliverance</i> is his follow-up to last year’s <i>Signs and Wonders</i>. The debut release was a pared-down, all-acoustic set, enriched by support from Kimberley Rew (ex-Katrina and the Waves). On this new album he broadens the sonic palate, adding a full rhythm section and switching between acoustic and electric guitar with a dab of harmonica, much like his avowed hero Neil Young.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Logan once fronted a tribute band, Free Again, and you hear Paul Rodgers in his vocal style. As a songwriter, his tastes are more Laurel Canyon – clear from the outset on the attractive opening track, ‘Deliverance’. But Logan’s his own man, a man audibly at ease with himself. Moments of tenderness, often directed at his “wife and muse” (‘Just The Way Your Heart Beats’), bump up against hard-rocking numbers (‘Didn’t Even Listen To Myself’). Active as a poet for the page as well as a songsmith, he turns in a distinctive lyric, whatever the medium. <o:p></o:p></div><span style="font-family: &quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Welcome as they are, one or two songs outstay their welcome, clocking in at over five minutes. But that’s nothing that can’t be fixed.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.stevelogan.co.uk/" target="_blank">www.stevelogan.co.uk</a></span><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-18253220252120842582015-09-08T12:31:00.000+01:002015-09-08T17:12:51.836+01:00Nick Drake - footnotes<b>THE PINK MOON FILES</b><br /><h2><o:p></o:p></h2><div class="MsoNormal">Jason Creed<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">(OMNIBUS)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">ISBN 978-1-84938-658-6<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Softcover. 230 pages<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When Nick Drake died in 1974 at the age of 26, he left three exquisitely crafted albums and a host of questions. So many questions. How to interpret that death: suicide or an accidental overdose? Just what sort of live performer was he: charismatic or shambolic? What of his love life?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the late 1990s, Drake-enthusiast Jason Creed published an important fanzine, <i>Pink Moon</i>, which explored these and other questions. Now, gathered between covers here are reprinted contributions, together with new material. In transcribed interviews or personal memoirs we hear from producer Joe Boyd, arranger Robert Kirby, friends Iain Cameron and Robin Frederick, Island press officer David Sandison, not to mention his sister and parents. An excellent piece by the late Scott Appel unpacks his guitar tunings for the specialist reader. There are chapters on live performances, rare recordings, TV documentaries, and reprints of original album reviews. (Pity the <i>NME</i>reviewer in 1969 who compared Drake unfavourably to Peter Sarstedt!) Also included is Jerry Gilbert’s heroic write-up of the only interview the monosyllabic Drake ever gave.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s good stuff, handsomely bound and presented. If I have a reservation, it is that there’s potential for an even better book inside here: a comprehensive source-book, a book that would be fully annotated, preferably with an index. As an editor, Creed is rather too hands-off, with the result that errors and conflicts of evidence are allowed to stand. Using the original <i>Pink Moon</i> as a primary source may be a constraint. Speculations dating back to 1997 by a third-year undergraduate about the clinical nature of Drake’s depression might be fine in a fanzine or discussion forum but sit ill alongside the memories of those who actually knew the man.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Reservations aside, this is an indispensable resource for every Drake fan. <o:p></o:p></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;</span><i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/"><span style="font-size: x-small;">R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">May/June 2011</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />=====================</span></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oO7l7osX1gc/Ve6_tVIGznI/AAAAAAAAAvA/Wgu4SlXazeE/s1600/Grantchester.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oO7l7osX1gc/Ve6_tVIGznI/AAAAAAAAAvA/Wgu4SlXazeE/s320/Grantchester.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Grantchester Meadows</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Last year (2014) marked the fortieth anniversary of Nick Drake’s death. It didn’t go unrecognised, of course. <i>Uncut</i> magazine carried a piece by John Robinson and interviews with the ‘usual suspects’. For a while I was in discussion with an editor about writing something myself. Searching for a ‘new angle’, I even did some field work by visiting Carlyle Road in Cambridge. This is a row of Victorian terraces where the undergraduate Drake found lodgings after moving out of college for his second, and as it turned out, final year at the university. According to biographer Trevor Dann, he soon fell out with his stiff-necked landlady and relocated round the corner to 65 Chesterton Road. It’s just a short hop, I realised, from there to The Boathouse pub where modern-day troubadours are to be heard plying their trade every Wednesday evening. People say ‘River Man’ was conceived around here. I searched in vain for the <i>genius loci</i>. Betty, I decided, was more likely to encounter the River Man in Grantchester Meadows, later commemorated in song by Pink Floyd, amid the white cow parsley and the plash of oars wafting up from the Cam. But I hadn’t the faintest idea whether Drake ever strayed this far out of town.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In fact, after thrashing around for a while, I had to admit I had nothing new to say. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”: Wittgenstein was right about that. Actually – if we’re being philosophically precise in use of language – it’s not true to say I had <i>nothing</i>. I had some small footnotes to offer to the Drake industry. And even footnotes to the footnotes. Since they can’t be inflated to bulk out another unnecessary article, I offer them here instead.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>That breakthrough gig<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">In December 1967 our man was on the bill at the Roundhouse in London. The event was ‘Circus Alpha Centauri’, one of a series of benefits in aid of underprivileged children, compered on the night of Saturday 23rd<span style="font-size: 13.3333330154419px;">&nbsp;</span>by Jimi Hendrix (dressed as Father Christmas, according to legend).* No one seems quite sure how Drake landed the gig, which proved so decisive for his career, but I have a theory. At the bottom of the original flyer I notice the production assistants listed as “Victoria and Louisa Ormsby-Gore”. Drake, we know, hung out with the Ormsby-Gores, a Chelsea set of socialites and debutantes he had met in his gap year.** Fairport Convention were also on the bill and, at some point in the evening, Fairport’s Ashley Hutchings spotted Drake. “I thought he was terrific”, the bassist told <i>Uncut</i>, “the guitar-playing, the songs. People would later say he had no stage presence but what partly drew me was that aura.” Hutchings engineered an introduction to producer Joe Boyd. Well, you know the rest.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dsviFjAZlps/Ve7BSz4F4DI/AAAAAAAAAvM/2huUpXnFxfs/s1600/Roundhouse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dsviFjAZlps/Ve7BSz4F4DI/AAAAAAAAAvM/2huUpXnFxfs/s320/Roundhouse.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>But does anyone <i>really</i> remember his live performances?<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">As a teenager, Ian Anderson, now editor of <i>fRoots</i> magazine, came across him at Les Cousins, the Soho folk venue: “It would be very easy to <i>not</i> remember seeing Nick Drake,” he told me. “I saw him do floor spots on Cousins all-nighters and most people fell asleep. Whatever you think of his records, he really was a dreadfully dull live performer with absolutely nothing memorable about him at all, other than not being very good. I'm sure I was only awake because I was either MC-ing or waiting to play!”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>He was <i>so deep</i>!<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Drake-heads get very excited by the so-called ‘Far Leys monologue’. It’s certainly a document of interest as being the only extended record of his speaking voice, a sort of audio letter to we-know-not-whom taped in the summer of 1967 after his sojourn in Aix-en-Provence. Returning drunk from a party in the small hours, he switched on the family tape recorder and rambled. Forty years later, the languid public-school accent defeats some of his unintended listeners.*** For example, in her book about&nbsp;<i>Pink Moon</i>, Drake's final album, US critic Amanda Petrusisch turns a platitude into a Zen insight. She has him say: “I think there’s something extraordinarily nice about seeing the doorknob before one goes to bed…” What he actually says is: “I think there’s something extraordinarily nice about seeing the <i>dawn up</i> before one goes to bed…” Indeed, anyone unaccustomed to self-deprecating irony and the studied evasiveness of the buttoned-up Englishman is liable to hear profundity where there is none; or none on the surface, anyway, where self-revelation is nowadays expected to lie. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There’s a line in the ‘monologue’ that always stuck in my mind because it invites earnest over-interpretation of this sort. It’s where he says, in mock-serious tones: “One forgets so easily the lies, the truth and the pain”. It felt like a quotation, but I couldn't place it. Then I happened to reread ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">Say, is there Beauty yet to find?<br />And Certainty? and Quiet kind?<br />Deep meadows yet, for to forget<br /><i>The lies, and truths, and pain?</i> . . . oh! yet<br />Stands the Church clock at ten to three?<br />And is there honey still for tea?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Rupert Brooke’s evocation of Cambridgeshire village life was a staple of school poetry anthologies and would have had particular resonance for someone about to read English Literature at Cambridge. Big abstractions are acceptable to the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon mind if they’re safely enclosed between quotation marks. As Patrick Humphries observes in his biography of Drake, there are similarities between Drake and Brooke, two golden boys born generations apart who died young. Both were looking for a place of refuge from the risks of saying too much: Drake found it in songwriting. In May 1904 the schoolboy Brooke wrote to his cousin:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">When I say what I mean, people tell me ‘O Rupert, what delightful nonsense you talk!’ and when I venture on the humorous, I am taken seriously and very promptly and thoroughly squashed for ‘saying such strange things’. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Drake, according to his friend Beverley Martyn, “would occasionally say something witty, but very rarely”. I suspect there is a serio-comic timbre in Drake if we’re attuned to hear it. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">=====<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />*This is the advertised date for Fairport’s appearance at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. However, other sources list the band as playing at Middle Earth (in Covent Garden) on that night. Conversely, Drake’s biographers agree that headlining on the night Drake appeared were Country Joe &amp; The Fish. The ‘stop press’ on the flyer announces them for Thursday 21st.<br /><br />**Strictly speaking, not a ‘gap year’ as is conventional nowadays, but a gap nine months. In those days, Oxbridge candidates generally stayed on for an extra term in the Sixth Form to take the entrance exams for Oxford or Cambridge. If successful, they would “go up” the following October. (Drake, having left school in summer 1966, took the Cambridge exam at a crammer in&nbsp;Birmingham.) For the overlap between ‘Alpha Centauri’ and the ‘Chelsea set’, see this <a href="http://www.mezquitadegranada.com/en/entrevistas/entrevista-shaij-abdalhaq.html" target="_blank">interview</a>&nbsp;with Abdalhaqq Bewley.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">&nbsp;***It’s striking how his English accent rings through, even when covering American material. On ‘Cocaine Blues’, one of the early home demos, he gives the title word a curious pronunciation. It sounds more like ‘cockaigne’, the land of plenty in medieval myth.<o:p></o:p></div></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-23236119515660153192015-09-07T11:58:00.000+01:002015-09-07T11:58:33.604+01:00Naomi Bedford<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xl1yThlkZPw/Ve1taC4laVI/AAAAAAAAAuw/THIh8TxSCwQ/s1600/NaomiBedford.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="188" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xl1yThlkZPw/Ve1taC4laVI/AAAAAAAAAuw/THIh8TxSCwQ/s320/NaomiBedford.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />“Because I’m quite eclectic musically, I needed some kind of theme to keep me in check.” <b>Naomi Bedford</b> is talking about her new album <i>A History Of Insolence</i> and its subtitle ‘<i>Songs Of Freedom, Dissent And Strife’</i>. It’s the second in a projected trilogy which began in 2011 with <i>Tales From The Weeping Willow: Songs Of Murder, Death And Sorrow</i>. “I’m hoping this one is a bit more uplifting than the last – it does start with ‘freedom’!” As before, she mixes traditional songs with new compositions, English material with Americana. Certainly, the eclecticism shines through in a novel mash-up of ‘Gypsy Davy’, in which Naomi ensures a happy ending for the high-born lady who beds a commoner. “In every version I’ve ever heard, the woman always seems to get her come-uppance. But in the Woody Guthrie version she keeps her baby, she stays with the gypsy. Not only that – the gypsy ends up being a musician, which I thought was kind of cool!”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The Brighton-based singer had a hit a few years back with the band Orbital, which led in turn to a couple more ‘techno’ experiments. But this wasn’t the real Naomi. Her earliest musical loves were the ballads she learned from her mother. “I always loved the drama of those big, long storytelling songs. And I was particularly drawn to the more macabre ones, the juicy murder ones.” Afraid of being pigeon-holed as a ‘dance’ singer, she embarked on a series of albums which clearly mark her path back to the roots music she grew up with. Financing them was tough, though. “I’m just a single mum working as an administrator on really low pay. I’m not a full-time musician,” she explains. On the last one, friends helped out for free. This time, there was a grant from Arts Council England. “It costs so much to do it, and yet making money from music just seems like an absolute impossibility. It’s so difficult to get your foot in the gigging scene. But if you can’t help yourself, if you <i>have </i>to create and write and sing, then you’re going to do it anyway.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">She’s found sympathetic collaborators in Paul Simmonds and Justin Currie, members of two of her favourite bands. “When I was a teenager, I was a major Men They Couldn’t Hang fan. I had posters of Paul on my wall. And posters of Del Amitri – Justin Currie. And now I’ve been working with them on the last two albums. It’s like my dream come true!”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Simmonds’s contribution as songwriter is prominent on the new album. The standout track is ‘Junktown’, a scabrous political commentary. Simmonds hesitantly auditioned this “funny little talking blues song” for Naomi in her kitchen, convinced that no one else would ever want to hear it. Her reaction was emphatic: “No way! That’s going on the album! I absolutely fell in love with it, especially the line ‘<i>Dads go dogging in the pale full moon</i>’. As much as it’s a hard-hitting anger song, it’s also quite funny.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Valuable celebrity endorsement has come from Shirley Collins: “She’s been really supportive.” Whenever Naomi plays on Shirley’s home turf in Lewes, Shirley is sure to come along, and Naomi had the distinction of being one of five artists personally invited to sing at Shirley’s birthday party last year.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The final album of the trilogy will be about ‘Love, Passion and Devotion’. Naomi was planning to make that one first, but then “we just thought with the state of the nation at the moment – so much going on in the world – it didn’t seem quite right to be doing the Love album now.” Here’s hoping the right time isn’t far off.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/">R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</a></i></span></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-35042277112154517772015-09-07T11:04:00.000+01:002015-09-07T11:08:22.864+01:00Jackson C Frank<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yFG4w1o53Js/Ve1f5zekdaI/AAAAAAAAAug/kKzsVFKusJE/s1600/JCF.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yFG4w1o53Js/Ve1f5zekdaI/AAAAAAAAAug/kKzsVFKusJE/s320/JCF.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>JACKSON C FRANK: THE CLEAR, HARD LIGHT OF GENIUS</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Jim Abbott</div><div class="MsoNormal">(BA DA BING) www.badabingrecords.com</div><div class="MsoNormal">ISBN 978-0-9909164-0-6 Softcover. 255pp.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“His scarred body housed a beautiful soul” – so writes Jim Abbott at the start of this, the first-ever biography of US singer-songwriter Jackson C Frank, and he challenges you to agree with him. Frank’s story is challenging enough in itself. The victim of a school fire in boyhood, he suffered horrific burns and carried the scars, physical and mental, for the rest of his life. In later years he battled paranoid schizophrenia and partial blindness, alternating homelessness and periods in institutional care. But, in between, he had one glorious moment. Using the insurance pay-out from the fire, he travelled to England. There, with a batch of newly composed songs (among them the classic ‘Blues Run The Game’) and Paul Simon as producer, he made a self-titled album that influenced everyone who heard it. Hanging out with Al Stewart, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, dating Sandy Denny, the man was at the epicentre of the London folk scene of the mid-1960s.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Later, ever a prophet without honour in his own country, Frank returned to the States. When he hit rock bottom in the 1990s, Abbott befriended him, became his legal guardian, and even encouraged him to record again. &nbsp;So the book is both biography and memoir. It brings out, often in poignant detail, how creativity and destructiveness are two sides of the same coin. Anecdotes of how he sabotaged his chances of reconciliation with his only surviving child, descriptions of his bloated body in later life, the “translucent skin” stretched over “layers of subcutaneous fat, yellow and rippled” – these make for painful reading.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Abbott pitches a strong case for the later recordings, particularly ‘Marlene’, an elegy for a girlfriend who perished in the school fire. But, for my money, Frank never again matched the perfection of his 1965 debut. A flawed, if not a “beautiful”, soul, he has found his ideal biographer.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/">R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</a></i></span></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-15706295600303696242015-07-28T17:12:00.000+01:002015-07-28T17:12:26.437+01:00Bloomsbury<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y87JyEO6xE0/Vbej-ySHqFI/AAAAAAAAAuE/ZY-jwgC-H-w/s1600/VWoolf2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="189" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y87JyEO6xE0/Vbej-ySHqFI/AAAAAAAAAuE/ZY-jwgC-H-w/s320/VWoolf2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;<span style="text-align: center;">Lydia Leonard as Virginia Woolf</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Nlei3YAWG20/Vbej_DPXLVI/AAAAAAAAAuA/W3CmDjFc9WI/s1600/VWoolf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="203" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Nlei3YAWG20/Vbej_DPXLVI/AAAAAAAAAuA/W3CmDjFc9WI/s320/VWoolf.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Virginia Woolf as Virginia Woolf</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The best thing I’ve read on ‘Bloomsbury’ is the little volume with that title by Quentin Bell, who was both Virginia Woolf’s nephew and her biographer. He represents this privileged faction – the Woolfs, the Bells, the Stracheys, the Keyneses – as engaged in a short-lived social and intellectual experiment. In their effort to “live a life of rational and pacific freedom, to sacrifice the heroic virtues in order to avoid the heroic vices, Bloomsbury was attempting something which, to the next generation, seemed unthinkable.” During the First World War, “it was still possible for an intelligent man or woman to be neutral”. With the advent of Fascism, he argues, Bloomsbury was confronted with a quarrel in which “neutrality was impossible”. The surviving Bloomsberries had no answers. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Whether <i>Life in Squares</i>, the BBC’s racy new dramatisation of the Bloomsbury set, will put such subtleties on screen or confine itself to the sexual shenanigans among these free spirits remains to be seen. By chance, the first episode, which aired last night, reminded me of one of my own early attempts to break into the literary world. This would be about 1983. Christopher Howse, a college contemporary, even then sporting a Shavian beard, half-hunter watch in his waistcoat, had landed a job at the <i>Catholic Herald</i> – Books Editor, I think, or Literary Editor – and offered me reviewing work on the paper. I was not and am not of the Pope’s party, but my agnosticism seemed to be no barrier. As far as I remember, only two books ever came my way. One was <i>Andrina</i>, a volume of short stories by the Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown. The other was a volume of Virginia Woolf’s Letters, newly available in paperback. The first review <i>was</i> published, but only after the newspaper’s editor stumbled across it when he was clearing out Christopher’s desk following the latter’s career-enhancing departure to the <i>Daily Telegraph</i>. The second languished in his bottom drawer unused. I’ve just rescued it from <i>my</i> bottom drawer. It doesn’t seem bad…&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume I: 1888-1912 (Chatto &amp; Windus)<o:p></o:p></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">“Do you think all the lower classes are naturally idiotic?” writes the 26-year-old Virginia Stephen to Saxon Sydney-Turner, betraying the prejudices of her age and class. The appearance in paperback of the Virginia Woolf Letters is a major publishing event, but I suspect that this first volume of Nigel Nicolson’s edition will provide more nourishment for the biographer than the <i>littérateur</i>. Indeed, it takes us only as far as the publication of her first novel, <i>The Voyage Out</i>. Virginia was a tireless correspondent, above all to her sister Vanessa, and the 638 letters printed here, while they show the informal shaping of that familiar prose style, so hectic yet thoughtful, make better evidence for the breathless vitality of a young woman coming of age – not yet a novelist. “Nessa and I have been arguing the ethics of suicide all the morning, as we are alone, and what is an immoral act,” she writes prophetically in April 1905. But these young ladies were not often alone. Their lives were fashionably filled with dinner parties and romancing; by letter 600 Virginia is equivocating over Leonard’s marriage proposal, asking only “that you should leave me free, and that I should be honest.” The complete Letters, with their authoritative editor’s introductions and excellent footnoting of personalities and events, are more than the sum of their parts, but this first part makes an adequate <i>hors d’oeuvre</i>.&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-44458059785625829522015-02-20T12:21:00.000+00:002015-02-20T12:27:39.281+00:00Kirsty MacColl remembered<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yxVDR2FFoWw/VOce7t_X0JI/AAAAAAAAAtc/e_hFSo9VAzc/s1600/KirstyMacColl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yxVDR2FFoWw/VOce7t_X0JI/AAAAAAAAAtc/e_hFSo9VAzc/s1600/KirstyMacColl.jpg" height="198" width="320" /></a></div><br />When Kirsty MacColl was killed in a speedboat accident off the Mexican coast in December 2000 it was a tragedy not just for the family and friends she left behind but for the wider world as well. At a stroke, we’d lost one of the most original voices in British music of the last thirty years, one who has still not received her due recognition. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">She was born in Croydon, South London, in 1959. Croydon is the kind of place you want to get out of – I should know, I went to school there – and Kirsty had the talent to transcend her origins. Interested in everything but subject to severe asthma as a child, she found refuge in music. As the third child of revered but doctrinaire folk singer Ewan MacColl, music was in her blood. However, the relationship with her father was not easy: he left her mother, dance teacher Jean Newlove, when Kirsty was very small to set up home with fellow folkie Peggy Seeger and she only saw him at weekends. MacColl <i>père</i> was famously hostile to pop music, which he dismissed as commercially driven and politically apathetic. For the young Kirsty, pop was an act of rebellion against what she called the “beard-and-sandals brigade”; it was the music of her own generation. But, more than that, for someone blessed with wide musical knowledge, who as a teenager had been captivated by Bach, it was an act of <i>choice</i>. As she told journalist Karen O’Brien, “there are things about pop music that are good… it’s not preaching, it’s uplifting”. Uplift is what she found as a youngster in Neil Young, in 60s girl-groups like The Shangri-Las, in the observational songwriting of Ray Davies and in the multilayered harmonies of Brian Wilson. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Her early career in music was stop-go. Signed to Stiff Records, she released a single, ‘They Don’t Know’, a precocious teen ballad of misunderstood love that only impacted when re-recorded by Tracey Ullman a few years later. She moved to Polydor, where another single, ‘There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis’, set the template for the humorous rockabilly that she’s still best remembered for. A cover of Billy Bragg’s ‘A New England’ brought Top Ten success, and her 1987 duet with Shane MacGowan on the Pogues’ ‘Fairytale Of New York’ has been on Christmas playlists ever since. Yet, despite these highs, record companies would not invest in her for the long term. They didn’t know where to place her or how to package her. She was too damned <i>original</i>.&nbsp; Later she signed to Virgin, only to be dumped once again when they were bought out by EMI. Between contracts she worked extensively as a backing vocalist for, amongst others, Talking Heads and The Smiths, but it was live touring with The Pogues in the late 80s which finally conquered her stage fright and seems to have given her the confidence to raise her game. By now she had perfected a sound. Multitracking her own vocals, Beach Boys-style, she found she could create a whole girl-group in the studio, a chorus of Kirstys who hadn’t been cloned by some Svengali but were emanations of herself; luscious harmonies, poured over the “jangly guitars” that she also loved, would combine with catchy vocal lines to produce infectious pop, raised above the norm by the sharp, intelligent lyrics that she toiled over so hard and delivered in a deadpan, recognisably English voice.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Although her early work, with its blend of pub rock, synths and R’n’B, was hugely enjoyable, it didn’t fully prepare us for that leap forward she took in the late 80s. Frequently a victim of ‘writer’s block’, she had found a way out through joint authorship. Although she insisted on a 50-50 split on royalties, the typical Kirsty collaboration, it seems, was for her co-writer to suggest a chord progression or send her a backing track, over which she then wrote melody and lyrics. On a series of albums beginning with <i>Kite</i> (1989) she widened and deepened her craft and distanced herself from digital sampling in favour of real instruments: “I never want to do anything else with a Fairlight ever again,” she announced. “It drives me mad, you can’t talk to it – it’s got no brain.” As before, the music was life-affirming and melodic, the lyrics witty and down-to-earth, but the stylistic range was broader, the targets more diverse. Thatcherism came in for a drubbing in ‘Free World’. Celebrity culture was in her sights in ‘Fifteen Minutes’. On the successor album, <i>Electric Landlady</i> (1991), the plight of New York’s homeless inspired a collaboration with Johnny Marr, ‘Walking Down Madison’, which also proved a breakthrough single for her in the States. Yet, alongside the uptempo rap of ‘Madison’, the same album contained ‘We’ll Never Pass This Way Again’, as tender and nostalgic a love song as anyone has written in a generation. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Titanic Days</i>(1994), made at a time when her ten-year marriage to producer Steve Lillywhite was on the rocks, is always referred to as her “divorce record”. Certainly it introduces a level of verbal menace (notably on ‘Can’t Stop Killing You’) without precedent in her work. Yet, ever again, the mood is varied – with the gentle lyricism of ‘Soho Square’ (a song that has inspired her fans to dedicate a bench in London’s <a href="http://brushondrum.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/soho-square-2010.html" target="_blank">Soho Square</a>&nbsp;to her memory) rubbing up against the knockabout farce of ‘Big Boy On A Saturday Night’.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As a girl in Croydon she’d already come to the conclusion that “anybody who spoke Spanish was having a better time than I was.” In the late 90s, increasingly fascinated by Latin America, the people and the music, she made numerous trips to Cuba and Brazil, resulting in what proved to be her final album, <i>Tropical Brainstorm</i>(2000). Seen by many as her finest achievement, it was, in her words, an “Anglo-Latin hybrid pop record”. Her life was back on track and she celebrated with a joyous album combining all her best qualities: feistiness (‘Us Amazonians’), off-the-wall humour (‘In These Shoes?’), resilience in the face of man trouble (‘England 2 Colombia 0’) and a wistfulness that seemed to be the flip side of her exuberance (‘Wrong Again’). <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I value her songs for many things, not least for their surging, anthemic choruses. You’d have to be cloth-eared not to want to join in when she lets rip in numbers like ‘Innocence’ or ‘My Affair’. It’s the ultimate in drive-time music. As James Knight, the musician with whom she found contentment in her final months, recalled, “to Kirsty driving was really just singing with a steering wheel in front of you”. Always suggested by experience or rooted in observation – she was a champion people-watcher – the songs unfold like short stories, or films. In the best of them she imagines other lives or other personae for herself – characters like ‘Celestine’, the saucy alter ego who steals up on her in a delicious bossa nova: ‘<i>She’s just a wild and wicked slut / And she lives inside my head and stops me sleeping</i>’. <o:p></o:p><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UyR-1RijX1k" width="459"></iframe></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Friends remember her as liking the company of men more than women, a “man’s woman”, not a “girly girl”. Certainly the songwriters she was known to admire, and the writers she worked with, were all men. Speaking to Tracey MacLeod in 1994, she confessed: “I’m not a big fan of the more introspective – or impressionistic, I should say – female singer-songwriter, with grand piano and lots of trailing veils.” But in other interviews, when probed on what had first motivated her to write, she revealed her need to take possession of the female voice. Listening to the radio as she grew up, she’d hear women singing songs which were obviously written by a man who was putting his words into the woman’s mouth – ‘<i>Oooh baby, I can’t live without you!</i>’ was the gist. “So where <i>are</i> all these pathetic women who can’t live without their man?” Kirsty demanded to know. “I don’t know any!” Her songs constantly prick the balloon of male pomposity, whether in the form of the guy in the chip shop whose claim to be Elvis is an early lesson in mendacious bragging, or the ‘<i>serial liar</i>’ of ‘England 2 Colombia 0’ who conceals his marital status from the newly divorced Kirsty: ‘<i>OK I didn’t mention my kids, I thought I’d wait a bit</i>,’ she sings, ‘<i>But I am free and single and he’s a lying git</i>.’<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>Most pop and rock artists do their best work in their twenties – that is, if they actually make it past 29 without fatality. Kirsty was an exception to this, as to so many, rules: she really hit her stride in her thirties. She was in it for the long haul, content to wait until the public caught up with her. As she reflected in 1993, “there aren’t that many 34-year-old pop singers who aren’t glamour-pusses! I feel to a certain extent I’m on this personal crusade.” Which makes it all the more frustrating that her career was cut off in its prime. Her loss a decade ago reminds us that there’s a lamentable void on the distaff side. What do we have now? The postmodern Barbie doll that is Katy Perry and a female drag queen calling herself Lady Gaga. As Kirsty told Nigel Williamson prophetically in 2000, “there’s a lot of serious crap around and there’s a lot of people who want to be celebrities and take themselves far too seriously.” She once described Chrissie Hynde as “the first and last rock icon for women”. She was being too modest.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;</span><i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/"><span style="font-size: x-small;">R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">November/December 2010</span></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-70868965562389261892014-12-09T11:39:00.000+00:002015-02-22T15:37:08.126+00:00Beverley Martyn<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TyHZ0ICoPns/VIbfDjGJeyI/AAAAAAAAArg/O3thbtOSscM/s1600/zzBeverleyMartyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TyHZ0ICoPns/VIbfDjGJeyI/AAAAAAAAArg/O3thbtOSscM/s1600/zzBeverleyMartyn.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div><br />“It doesn’t matter how long it is, it’s good for me. Something good in my life!” I’ve just reminded Coventry-born <b>Beverley Martyn</b> that it’s fourteen years since she released her last album and almost fifty since she recorded her first single. Now she’s back with a new solo album, <i>The Phoenix And The Turtle</i>. Judging by the launch gig at London’s Bush Hall, where she was backed by a tight band led by her producer Mark Pavey, she’s firing on all cylinders. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The new release features songs written throughout her entire career, beginning with her very first, ‘Sweet Joy’. “I was a wishful girl then,” she tells me. “I think because I didn’t know what I was doing I just came up with some things that were quite original.” The song took shape at the end of her relationship with the late Bert Jansch, one of many creative titans she’s worked with. Such songs are “like an affirmation. It comes out of whatever happened, so you learn something from it. You can learn about exquisite sadness”. &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">She’ll always be best remembered for her partnership, marital and musical, with John Martyn, and the two classic albums they made together for Island Records. “John was probably the biggest musical influence on me,” she reflects. “He was full of music”. After the marriage broke up, John went on to great solo success but Beverley discovered her name wasn’t on the contract. It rankles still: “I was young and trusted my new husband to make sure that I was safe and everything.” John is commemorated on her new album in ‘Women And Malt Whiskey’: “He did like the malt. But songwriting isn’t always about life. You have to make up some of it. You take from sources of inspiration, from other people, from whatever.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Another man in her life was Nick Drake. She’s finally finished and recorded ‘Reckless Jane’, a song she started writing with Nick shortly before he died. “He was having fun. Relaxed. Yes, he was introspective, but when he was with me he actually interacted in the present. He stayed with me. I was the mummy with all the chicks around. He was a large duckling. He just followed the crowd.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">She deplores the changes to the music business since the glory days of Island under her old friend Chris Blackwell. “You used to be taken into the directors’ room at board meetings and they’d say, ‘This is our latest artist and we’ve decided to give time to this person. We believe in her’. Now it seems impossible to get close to the head.” And the status of women in the business – has that improved any? “Well, if they get their tits out, they do get a better deal.” Then they get messed up, of course: “It’s like casualty time. Even Adele. You’re talking about a fledgling. I don’t call her an artist yet. You’ve got to give her time to get messed up.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I suggest that the obsession with image – the right dress, the right make-up – has crept into even the BBC Folk Awards. “I’m not particularly interested in folk or the Folk Awards. My roots are in jazz and blues. I love jazz. I’ve been spoilt for the greatest musicians. I see what’s going on now. Nothing too much excites me in the new range.”<o:p></o:p></div><span style="font-family: &quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What of the future? There’s talk of putting out her unreleased material from the 60s and 70s. “I don’t know what the legalities are. There’d be stuff that I haven’t finished or stuff that I was working on with Denny Cordell maybe.” If there’s anything half as good as her gravelly take on ‘When The Levee Breaks’, I’ll be the first to pre-order.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 16.8666667938232px;">First published in</span><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" style="font-size: small; line-height: 16.8666667938232px;">&nbsp;<i>R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</i></a><span style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 16.8666667938232px;">.&nbsp;</span><br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-91031200106239197662014-05-19T12:42:00.000+01:002014-05-19T14:19:59.473+01:00The Razorbills<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sanjHzDUFOU/U3nthKRJ99I/AAAAAAAAAq0/uqfLOnpREPQ/s1600/zzRazorbills.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sanjHzDUFOU/U3nthKRJ99I/AAAAAAAAAq0/uqfLOnpREPQ/s1600/zzRazorbills.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div><br />The <a href="http://www.therazorbills.co.uk/">Razorbills</a> have just released their second album, <i>Like Everbody Else</i>. Expectations are high, but before I give it a spin, this might be a good moment to dig out my review of their 2012 debut...<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><b>To Hell With Youth And Beauty</b> (Lost Wasp Records)<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">The clue is in the album title. Scottish ‘indie-folk-pop’ band The Razorbills are not chasing the teen market. They’re making music for grown-ups. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s primarily an acoustic line-up, with prominent banjo and mandolin from Harry Thomson and violin from Michelle McClure. But the sound is infused with an electric energy and unpredictable quirkiness that steers well clear of the over-praised Mumfords’ territory.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Alan McClure, lead vocalist and chief songwriter, is a distinctive talent, sometimes reminiscent of fellow Scot Mike Heron. As a lyricist he’s a master of the witty put-down. (‘<i>It’s not my job to think on a global scale | So kindly shut your gob</i>’ may not be everyone’s idea of an eco-anthem.) But he can do serious as well: ‘God Forgotten’ meditates on the disillusionment following a religious upbringing. With one ear cocked to his folk heritage, McClure adds catchy, danceable tunes, and, deftly supported by the rhythm section of Jon Noad and Richard Ipaint, the whole thing takes off. &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div><span style="font-family: &quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span> <span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I first discovered The Razorbills through their friendship with 1960s folk icon Shelagh McDonald. Appropriately, much of the music here – ‘Flower In The 60s’ an obvious example – sounds like a creative engagement with the past. Definitely a band on the up.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">First published in<a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/"> <i>R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</i></a>. Look out for my review of Alan McClure's solo album in the current issue.</span><br /><br /><!--[endif]-->Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-6965050018793511292014-01-28T15:04:00.000+00:002015-02-22T15:12:49.129+00:00Shelagh McDonald interview<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Zs9poj0OH6o/UufDXj_9E7I/AAAAAAAAAqQ/rmb7RTrCQjg/s1600/ShelaghMcDonald14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Zs9poj0OH6o/UufDXj_9E7I/AAAAAAAAAqQ/rmb7RTrCQjg/s1600/ShelaghMcDonald14.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As comebacks go, this one takes some beating. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, <a href="http://sandydenny.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/the-return-of-shelagh-mcdonald.html" target="_blank">Shelagh McDonald</a>&nbsp;was one of the most respected singer-songwriters on the folk scene. After migrating south from her native Scotland and making a couple of impressive albums, she’d been hailed by <i>Melody Maker</i> as ‘the new Sandy Denny’. Then, in 1972, she simply vanished. For over thirty years, rumours of her whereabouts circulated. Finally, in 2005, with her back catalogue now attracting attention from a new generation, she resurfaced, to tell of a catastrophic experience with LSD that had caused her to quit the music business. Her voice shot, she’d spent the intervening decades travelling, often living under canvas. Happily, that velvety voice has now returned and Shelagh, confidence restored, is performing again.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This interview was conducted in July 2013. We spoke shortly after she’d played a rare London gig, supporting Mike Heron and Trembling Bells. &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>You've said that female folk singers were unusual on the club scene in the ‘60s. Did you find it a welcoming environment?<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">From the moment I decided to take music seriously, I strove to be accepted as a musician, pure and simple, and the guys in the business have consistently paid me the compliment of treating me as one of them. They’ve been great... never patronized, nor let me off the hook if I’d done a rotten gig.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><i>I love your guitar style. Must require a lot of practice. Who were your masters in finger style?<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">My guitar heroes?! How long have you got! The very first influence was Bert Jansch, whose albums I wore down to within an inch of their lives to learn exactly what he was doing with his fingers. Would like to say I did the same with Davey Graham, but his Arabic cross-rhythms were totally beyond me. (I have played his guitar, though! Broke a string one night in Cousins and, while fixing it, became aware of a pair of hands clutching a guitar as he gently lowered it down on my shoulders... felt as if I’d just been given the Order of the Garter!). My friend Keith Christmas also helped steer me away from the strict folky fingerstyle I used for traditional stuff and, like many in the folk scene, Joni Mitchell solved the problem of bringing colour to one’s guitar sound without breaking your finger-joints... thus began my addiction to open tunings.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><i>You started (am I right?) by singing trad material and other people's songs. When and how did you start writing your own songs?<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">As with guitar playing, so with songwriting... Joni’s first album&nbsp;was the one that broke the mould for me. Sure, there were loads of good songs being written, but for me they lacked the introspection I was after. I’m a great one for the ‘stream of consciousness’ school of songwriting, because complete honesty is a prerequisite for any art form and songwriting is no different. The only problem with this is, of course,&nbsp;that you can only be as honest as your self-development will allow and I now look back on my early songs as being rather like reading Adrian Mole... or should that be Ariadne Mole?!<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><i>Several of your songs from the ‘60s are about named individuals - Rod, Liz… That's rather different from, for instance, Sandy Denny, who wrote about her friends but concealed their identities in opaque lyrics. Any thoughts on the relative merits in lyric-writing of telling it straight vs wrapping up one's meaning?<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">I’ve always had very laid-back friends... always told them I was writing about them and felt that if I’d disguised their names they would have been a bit miffed.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><i>At the two gigs I've been to you haven’t revived your old self-written songs. How do you feel about those songs now?<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">My personal favourites are those I played piano on, and of the others, I would say that ‘Odyssey’ and ‘Peacock Lady’ have stood the test of time.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><i>When and how did your voice ‘come back’? Was it before the events of 2005 when the press rediscovered you?<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">Having read in the Scottish Daily Mail in 2005 that my albums had been re-issued I thought I’d better see if my voice (which I’d completely given up on) could be cranked up to an acceptable level in case anyone asked me to sing for my supper! Gordon [her late partner] and I were living in the middle of a forest at the time and I would start with little ten minute sessions singing anything that came into my head. At this point my throat was still seized up and it could be a bit painful. Each day I’d sing for an extra ten minutes and after about nine days my throat started to relax. From then it was a simple matter of gradually increasing the volume till I was able to really feel what was happening to my vocal cords and regard my voice as an instrument to be played seriously rather than being picked up and strummed to pass away a few idle moments.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><i>Does the music business seem a totally different place now? If so, what are the biggest changes you've noticed?<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">The music scene is unrecognizable but the audiences are the same. I think that’s what keeps us all going. It’s the old story... the digital signal has changed everything, particularly the legal side of things, and I’m not alone in referring to this as a minefield. Back then, a folk concert in a proper concert hall was regarded as a mega event. I got my first professional gigs by using the ubiquitous door-stop sized ‘Folk Directory’ and writing to every folk club in the country and people would book you without having heard of you. Anyone who was daft enough to travel from Scotland to Devon for peanuts was good enough for them because we were all part of this mad family! It goes without saying I wish there were more folk clubs and that they met more than just once a&nbsp;month. However, I applaud the trend in combining folk with story-telling, poetry, stand-up, etc.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><i>How has your own songwriting changed?<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">I’m aiming for a more open-ended approach. After a while the whole idea of sticking rigidly to one verse, followed by a chorus to be repeated between successive verses is like putting music into a straitjacket. Would like to think I’m playing around and experimenting more, and hopefully taking more risks.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><i>What's next? Can we expect a new album? I hope so!<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">Next gigs on the horizon are the Wickerman in Dumfries and Galloway, the&nbsp;Oran&nbsp;Mor in&nbsp;Glasgow, then on to the Sidmouth Folk Festival. Am really looking forward to all of them and to starting my first album for (don’t remind me how many) years next month. Around autumn I’ll be working with an amazing songwriter, Nigel H Seymour, who I would urge folks to listen out for.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><i>(Cheeky question but…) how do you plan to vote in the Scottish referendum?</i><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">Am torn here, firstly because I have a much loved relative (alas, no longer with us) who was a prime mover and shaker in bringing the SNP out of the backwoods and if I opted for the status quo he might turn in his grave. On the other hand, he might be equally mortified if he knew that our oil revenues continued to be controlled, not by Whitehall, but by the major oil companies operating from London if we voted for home rule. I will take my cue from my adored relative and vote consistently where my conscience dictates.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[This interview first appeared in part in&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/"><i>R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</i></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">, September/October 2013. Thanks to editor Sean McGhee, to Heather Maxwell McLennan for permission to use her photograph, and of course to Shelagh herself.]</span></span><br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-15515745736776383142014-01-23T10:49:00.000+00:002014-01-23T10:53:45.551+00:00King Crimson book<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0dCGtuk0pp4/UuDy3rlOQfI/AAAAAAAAAqA/qVHWRP7JWQk/s1600/CrimsonBookCover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0dCGtuk0pp4/UuDy3rlOQfI/AAAAAAAAAqA/qVHWRP7JWQk/s1600/CrimsonBookCover.jpg" height="320" width="208" /></a></div><b><br /></b><b>THE CONCISE MUSICAL GUIDE TO KING CRIMSON AND ROBERT FRIPP (1969-1984)<br /></b>Andrew Keeling<br />(SPACEWARD) www.andrewkeeling.co.uk<br />ISBN 978-0-9570489-3-5 Softcover. 138 pp. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />“King Crimson is a way of doing things,” says Robert Fripp, the enigmatic founder and powerhouse behind the band in all its many incarnations. For forty years since it emerged, fully formed, as the originator of ‘progressive rock’, Crimson has been “doing things”, fusing jazz, rock, classical and folk with a healthy dose of ‘alternative’ philosophy and whatever else takes Fripp’s fancy at the time. He gathers like-minded, high-calibre musicians, gives them a reading-list (according to drummer Bill Bruford) and, together, they explore. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Crimson is a way of life for its followers, too, none of them more zealous than Andrew Keeling, musicologist and composer. After writing guides to three of the early albums, he now surveys their entire output up to 1984, taking in also Fripp’s solo projects and collaborations. I desperately wanted to like this book. Apart from Sid Smith’s band biography, there is little good critical discussion of their work. But I found Keeling’s approach frustrating. I’m unclear who he is writing for. Commissioned by Fripp himself, the book mixes personal anecdote with generalisations about the era and about the relationship of Crimson’s music to that era; added to that is a deal of technical musical analysis which may deter potential readers and often seems disconnected from the function of interpretation which it should serve.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Essentially, the author expects us to know stuff already. He’s not big on explanation. <i>In The Court Of The Crimson King</i> “unlocks the entire semiology of the counter-culture”. How? Is ‘Ladies Of The Road’ misogynistic or not? I was none the wiser at the end of a paragraph about ‘political correctness’ and the ‘nanny state’. <o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 115%;">Carping aside, I learned things here: the reasons for the band’s initial break-up in 1974; the influence of World Music on </span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 115%;">Discipline</i><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 115%;"> (1981). But overall, I fear, Fripp’s resistance to explaining himself has rubbed off on his interpreter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/"><i>R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</i></a></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-4810856331758906562013-04-08T15:35:00.000+01:002013-04-13T11:30:26.983+01:00The Unknowing Master<br /><div class="MsoNormal">Happening to mention to an old friend recently that I had once won a prize in a short story competition, I fell into the inevitable elephant trap. “Can we read it?” he asked. “Why not republish it?” So, with heavy heart, I dug the magazine out of a tattered box and read the story for the first time in thirty-five years. I found a self-conscious cleverness about it which now embarrasses me, but I could see below the flashiness there was a certain stylistic flair of a type that gets you noticed. It evidently got the attention of revered sci-fi author and all-round good egg <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Aldiss">Brian Aldiss</a>, who judged the competition. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Despite Aldiss’s flattering description of me as “discerningly hip”, the story now seems like a relic of Cold War paranoia, of a time when Mutual Assured Destruction promised to wipe us all out, leaving only a few remaining idealists to eke out an existence on some Pacific islet. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The jokes come from spending too much time in a “writers’ workshop” group at Oxford, where I grew to relish the sound of laughter when I read my efforts before an audience.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The story first appeared in <i>Isis </i>in December 1977. Turning to the back cover, I’m reminded that the editor at the time was a pushy young man called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Thompson_(television_executive)">Mark Thompson</a>; I believe he later joined the BBC.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Enough with the throat-clearing. For what(ever) it’s worth, here it is. (Click on frames to enlarge.)<o:p></o:p></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ps203cS5YKg/UWLSgmXV33I/AAAAAAAAAm4/VN4sJ9cZFnI/s1600/Isis1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ps203cS5YKg/UWLSgmXV33I/AAAAAAAAAm4/VN4sJ9cZFnI/s320/Isis1.jpg" width="126" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B7GpknwGLQ8/UWLSlJJ9LqI/AAAAAAAAAnA/8HCQHyxRO8Y/s1600/Isis2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B7GpknwGLQ8/UWLSlJJ9LqI/AAAAAAAAAnA/8HCQHyxRO8Y/s320/Isis2.jpg" width="220" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1EvSyjOMH5g/UWLSpIzQuFI/AAAAAAAAAnI/sBUMSR2C31Y/s1600/Isis3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1EvSyjOMH5g/UWLSpIzQuFI/AAAAAAAAAnI/sBUMSR2C31Y/s320/Isis3.jpg" width="226" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dV8EE6S-BHo/UWLSthkuZOI/AAAAAAAAAnQ/WA8b0XT-QWI/s1600/Isis4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dV8EE6S-BHo/UWLSthkuZOI/AAAAAAAAAnQ/WA8b0XT-QWI/s320/Isis4.jpg" width="228" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-89992575212896006652013-01-29T15:13:00.000+00:002013-01-29T15:13:00.264+00:00Bumpers<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HTgHgSbiBiQ/UQfiL-aLkzI/AAAAAAAAAl8/J38U0CRX1_8/s1600/bumpers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HTgHgSbiBiQ/UQfiL-aLkzI/AAAAAAAAAl8/J38U0CRX1_8/s320/bumpers.jpg" width="306" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Let me take you back forty years. Harold Wilson is Prime Minister. In the General Election of 1970, Harold of the Gannex mac and trademark pipe will be replaced by ‘confirmed bachelor’ Ted Heath, ‘Grocer Heath’ as the satirists called him. But nothing much changes. Soviet missiles are still pointed at western Europe. On the other side of the world the Vietnam War continues its murderous course. The women’s movement has begun to stir, and young people argue about politics… <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Well, some young people do. If you’re a shy schoolboy like this one, indifferent to geopolitical machinations that you can neither understand nor influence, you prefer to immerse yourself in music. Which, in those days, arrived on 12-inch pieces of vinyl with lustrous artist-designed packaging.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The <i>physicality</i> of the vinyl experience is impossible to replicate now. (CDs half-destroyed it; with downloads there’s nothing left to hold.) New records were reluctant to come out of their sleeves. That bashfulness was part of the appeal. You had to coax them out gingerly, being careful not to put sweaty fingers on the playing surface, lest the smudge attract dust. You watched the playing arm track across the vinyl from play-in to play-out grooves, taking you on a twenty-minute musical adventure. Then, unless severely disappointed – or you had homework to finish – you flipped the disc and went through the whole experience a second time.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Stumbling into adolescence at the tail end of the 1960s as I did, there was the feeling of having arrived at a party just as it was breaking up. More empty bottles than full ones. People who had arrived singly were leaving in pairs. Sure, the hair was still long and the skirts were still short (well, on the average high street, anyway) but the revolutionary zeal of the youthquake was beginning to ossify. The ghastly spectre of the 1970s was knocking at the door: the ‘three-day week’, the endless industrial strife and (worst of all horrors) the Bay City Rollers. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">At school, <i>circa</i> 1970, someone formed a ‘Progressive Music Society’. Not very ‘progressive’ by historical standards – I recall a lot of headbanging in the lunch hour to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, which was hardly my thing – but occasionally some boy with taste would bring in an Island album. That’s how friendships form. Because, you see, Island Records, greatest of the independents of the era, was ‘my’ label. To see its distinctive pink record label with the white letter ‘i’ revolving on the turntable was a guarantee of quality as certain as any <i>appellation</i>on a wine bottle. In fact, such a guarantee that, should your pocket money stretch, you could almost buy a record unheard, confident that if the taste-masters thought it was worth recording then it was very likely worth hearing.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Nowadays, accessing music is like turning on a tap. Back then it was more like drawing from a well; you had to make the effort, schlepp up the hill with your bucket. And albums were expensive. So we relied on ‘samplers’, which offered all the best acts on a label anthologised at half the price of an album by any one of them. Today, samplers are routinely given away free with music mags. In the late ’60s it was a ground-breaking idea, pioneered by CBS as a means of reaching their intended audience at a time when ‘Auntie’ Beeb controlled the radio waves and airplay for rock music was limited. And no one did samplers better than Island. Beginning in 1969 with <i>You Can All Join In</i> and <i>Nice Enough To Eat</i>, the company extended the successful format to a double-album in 1970 with <i>Bumpers</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q7SELKsGWoQ/UQfiXbPuJsI/AAAAAAAAAmE/_ZKVloI8QEo/s1600/YouCanAllJoinIn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q7SELKsGWoQ/UQfiXbPuJsI/AAAAAAAAAmE/_ZKVloI8QEo/s320/YouCanAllJoinIn.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">You Can All Join In</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> has a legendary cover. A photo by Hipgnosis shows a bunch of cool dudes, a selection of the musicians featured on the album, huddled in Hyde Park on a chilly morning. The message to the listener is clear: come on in; complete the circle; we are you and you are us. The artwork of <i>Bumpers</i> was less distinguished – a giant pair of training shoes against a lurid yellow background – but the message was the same. Retailing at 29 shillings and 11 pence (£1.49 in modern parlance), with a running-time of around 80 minutes, <i>Bumpers</i> was my full-body baptism into the Island cult. It took me from the jazz-rock of If to the folk-rock of Fotheringay and Renaissance. It introduced me to broody singer-songwriters like Cat Stevens and Nick Drake. It enshrined one of my all-time favourite guitar riffs (Mott The Hoople, ‘Thunderback Ram’). Three of the most forward-thinking bands of the era, Traffic, Jethro Tull and King Crimson, each fielded strong tracks. Even Island’s Caribbean origins were not overlooked, with a dash of reggae from Jimmy Cliff. OK, so Bronco and Blodwyn Pig will never merit a place among the immortals, but what astonishes me forty years on is how much of this music still stands up. It entered my body in 1970. It will never go away.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span><br /><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/">R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</a>&nbsp;</i>under the title 'It Started With A Disc'</span></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-76813528628382336582013-01-29T10:40:00.002+00:002018-01-06T12:13:11.987+00:00Martin Simpson<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DmU4bAntthY/UQemOZeJkYI/AAAAAAAAAlk/pSsla_IKuhM/s1600/MartinSimpson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DmU4bAntthY/UQemOZeJkYI/AAAAAAAAAlk/pSsla_IKuhM/s320/MartinSimpson.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Martin Simpson has been a full-time professional musician since 1970 and is, without question, one of the finest acoustic and slide guitar players in the business, as well as an accomplished banjoist and songwriter. In addition to his solo work, he’s constantly in demand as a session player; of special note is a career-long collaboration with June Tabor (‘staggering, an amazing singer’, in his words), a musical friendship that I’m delighted to see he revives on his new album, <i>Purpose &amp; Grace</i>. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One constant throughout a long and fulfilling career crowned with awards has been his passion for American music. How did a lad from Scunthorpe become so interested in the American ballad, I asked him when we spoke recently. ‘The first ballad I ever heard was in junior school, a version of “Barbry Allen”, and it absolutely nailed me. I had such an intense emotional response to it’. This was the early 60s, when the folk revival was hitting its stride. Like many at the time he quickly found his way to Joan Baez’s albums, adding ‘Mary Hamilton’ and ‘Geordie’ to his youthful repertoire. ‘That was a lot of people’s exposure to the American ballad form, and shortly after that I heard Peggy Seeger. I was hooked – that was it!’ <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Living in the States for a good part of the 1980s, married at the time to an American, he plunged deeper into Americana. <i>Smoke and Mirrors</i> was a blues-based album more American than cherry pie. Ask him about his guitar influences and he’ll reel off a list of African-American masters before namechecking those nearer home like Davy Graham or Bert Jansch.&nbsp;&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">So, in a sense, he rediscovered the traditional music of his native land through the American balladeers? Yes, he agrees: ‘It was all part of this massive amount of music that I was exposed to.’&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>Which brings us to Hedy West, another formative influence, who, like Peggy Seeger, was resident in Britain in the 60s.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-72TecTZ2vt0/UQemYkn6KKI/AAAAAAAAAls/c7gp9Qb3d_8/s1600/HedyWest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-72TecTZ2vt0/UQemYkn6KKI/AAAAAAAAAls/c7gp9Qb3d_8/s320/HedyWest.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As a teenager, Simpson first saw Hedy at his local folk club. ‘I had a major crush on her,’ he recalls. ‘She was really lovely. I purchased a copy of <i>Ballads</i> from her. She signed it for me with a very sweet little drawing.’ He cherishes that record still, although he’s had to buy a replacement copy as he wore out the original with repeated playing. Ever since then he’s been ‘proselytizing’, as he puts it, on her behalf, urging anyone who’ll listen to seek out her albums, hard as they’ve been to find until recently. ‘She had a beautiful voice and she was an absolute master of timing and, just, conversational shifts in singing. Massively important, and massively influential, certainly on me.’ <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">‘The Sheffield Apprentice’ is one of the songs Simpson learned from Hedy West: ‘It’s a really interesting song on lots of levels. To start with, it’s a brilliant preservation of a British ballad in the States. I don’t know of any English version of it, despite the fact that it’s obviously an English song in derivation. I love the story. As Kit, my wife, pointed out, it’s a song where a woman is corruptly wielding power. That’s a very strong idea, a very strong image. Mostly, in folk songs, you find it’s men being corrupt with their power to have their evil way. Here, the poor man ends up getting hung because he’s faithful to his girlfriend! I also love the tune.’<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I ask how he approaches traditional music in general. ‘In my music room I have a wall full of books. Bronson’s <i>Traditional Tunes</i>, the Child Ballads, all those American collections… You name it. If I see anything that’s on the subject, I buy it. Then you hear recorded versions. I listen a lot when I’m on the road to field recordings, as well as listening to modern music. So I’ll be constantly on the listen, on the look-out, for a great version of a ballad. Having found a great tune, then it’s up to you to decide what to do lyrically with it – whether you use an existing set of lyrics or you look through the various versions and find something that just adds a little more atmosphere, a little more depth or tension to the story. It’s a great process, a wonderful process. And great fun.’<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>First published in <a href="http://www.efdss.org/front/Publications/publications/58">English Dance &amp; Song</a> magazine as part of a feature on the traditional ballad ‘The Sheffield Apprentice’.</i>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-21520399662009670822012-11-17T15:26:00.001+00:002013-01-28T16:17:20.840+00:00Josienne Clarke<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wOuySUhoerU/UKerMEO8EhI/AAAAAAAAAlA/CasVwqYMpHE/s1600/JosienneClarke.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wOuySUhoerU/UKerMEO8EhI/AAAAAAAAAlA/CasVwqYMpHE/s320/JosienneClarke.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>One Light Is Gone</b><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">(Hatfish, released November 2010) <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Josienne Clarke is an emerging talent on the London folk scene. Although she took classical singing lessons as a teenager, hers is a voice free of contrivance, husky in its upper register, well suited to the singer-songwriter terrain she now occupies. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On this, her debut album, she’s accompanied by Ben Walker, a guitarist with a technique to die for. He studied classical guitar before moving to folk fingerstyle in the manner of Jansch or Renbourn. As well as doubling on mandolin, he supplies discreet string arrangements on several tracks.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Sometimes – ‘Midnight Moon’ is an example – Clarke can sound like the omnipresent Laura Marling, but in general her sympathies, and her careful diction, are closer to the 60s and 70s sirens she admires. I hear Linda Thompson; I hear Shelagh McDonald.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">She has trad songs in her repertoire, but this debut album is all her own compositions. The title track is a wistful ballad vaguely reminiscent of the Thompsons’ ‘Dimming Of The Day’. ‘Done’ circles round unassuming guitar arpeggios. In contrast, ‘All My Truth’ is jaunty and bluegrassy, evidence that Clarke is no one-trick pony.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I know her to be an engaging live performer. This album can only win her new friends.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.josienneclarke.co.uk/">www.josienneclarke.co.uk</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/"><i>R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</i></a></span></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-17377759860381997242012-10-30T10:06:00.000+00:002013-01-28T16:17:51.385+00:00Emily Portman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x2Tj38PVQa8/UI-lkWeD1oI/AAAAAAAAAkg/QcEQf55HHcg/s1600/xEmilyPortman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x2Tj38PVQa8/UI-lkWeD1oI/AAAAAAAAAkg/QcEQf55HHcg/s320/xEmilyPortman.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Slaughtered Lamb, London,&nbsp;18 July 2012</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When I interviewed the mighty June Tabor last year, I sneaked in a question at the end about the current folk scene. Anyone she had her eye on? Yes, she said, after a pause: Emily Portman, an artist she admires for “making new songs of old and working folktale and storytelling into songs”. It’s hard to better that as a summation of Emily’s striking gifts, on evidence again as she launched her second album, <i>Hatchling</i>, in the basement of a London pub.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Since her fiercely original debut with <i>The Glamoury</i> in 2010, Emily has had a “hatchling” of her own. The new baby was in safe hands “over the road”, she assured us, but still much on her mind. Taking to the stage with her quartet of multi-instrumentalists, she interspersed new songs with lullabies. The maternity leave has been well-spent, evidently, giving her time to widen her reading in fairytale and legend. ‘Hinge Of The Year’ is a joyous riff on an Angela Carter character, while ‘Scorching Sun’ draws inspiration from the writings of Marina Warner. ‘Sunken Bells’ gave rise to some girly banter with violinist and cellist. Was it about Narnia? Was it about the submerged village of the Lake District? Not much doubt about the backstory of ‘Old Mother Eve’, the one traditional number on the new album, where Emily made space for a jolly audience singalong on the chorus. She’s recently taken up banjo; while her vocal style remains rootedly English (and long may it continue so), the new instrumentation added a distinctive Appalachian feel to the title track, a reworking of the myth of Leda and the swan.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">“It’s great to be out again!” she giggled, relishing the intimacy of the club environment, as she slipped into an old favourite, ‘Stick Stock’. The audience couldn’t agree more.&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/"><i>R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</i></a></span></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-21269988512859238032011-12-01T15:13:00.000+00:002019-02-01T15:19:28.712+00:00John Martyn<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sIVJozUGFjo/XFRguwMM4pI/AAAAAAAAA2g/ywfdjtx87nY6x1W5HKUpZfXPmQq1TpN-ACLcBGAs/s1600/John_Martyn-Heaven_And_Earth-Frontal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sIVJozUGFjo/XFRguwMM4pI/AAAAAAAAA2g/ywfdjtx87nY6x1W5HKUpZfXPmQq1TpN-ACLcBGAs/s1600/John_Martyn-Heaven_And_Earth-Frontal.jpg" /></a></div><b><br /></b><b>Heaven And Earth</b> (ABSOLUTE, 2011, CD)<br /><br />I yield to none in my admiration for the young John Martyn. The albums he made in the 1960s and 70s<span style="font-family: &quot;helvetica neue&quot;; font-size: 11px;">&nbsp;-&nbsp;</span>from <i>London Conversation</i> to <i>Grace &amp; Danger</i> by way of the unimpeachable <i>Solid Air</i> in 1973 - are among the finest in the golden age of Island Records. But then something happened to him. To be precise, the 80s happened to him.<br /><br />He forsook the fabulous acoustic finger-picking technique he'd derived from Davy Graham for the new god of electronics; and, not helped by his epic boozing, he developed a vocal style so slurred and mannered he could give Vic Reeves's 'club singer' a run for his money. (Kind hearts prefer to compare this later croaky drawl to Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen.)<br /><br />The new album, the last he completed before his death in 2009, was recorded at home amid the aural distractions of boiling kettles and barking dogs. There's a tight, jazz-funk groove underlying the songs, but they rarely develop beyond repeated chordal phrases over which Martyn burbles and extemporises. Only the one non-Martyn composition included here, Phil Collins's 'Can't Turn Back The Years', lifts him from his lethargy.<br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot;;">[First published in&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot;;"><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">RnR</a>]&nbsp;</span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-16476137553346393272011-02-26T15:17:00.007+00:002011-02-26T15:30:48.403+00:00Amy Macdonald<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BxX7P6v6b14/TWkcMZhNvyI/AAAAAAAAAZw/gmCADsBsosc/s1600/AmyMacdonald.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 276px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578020612809277218" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BxX7P6v6b14/TWkcMZhNvyI/AAAAAAAAAZw/gmCADsBsosc/s400/AmyMacdonald.jpg" /></a> <br /><div><div><strong>Corn Exchange, Cambridge, 25 October 2010</strong><br /><br />“Most people hate their jobs – I <em>love</em> mine!” says Amy Macdonald, looking out into a mosh-pit of wage-slaves on a Monday night. Coming from anyone else this could sound a tad supercilious, but Amy Macdonald, a straight-talking Glaswegian, is doing what she loves and her enthusiasm is infectious.<br /><br />She’s wholesome, but with rock’n’roll attitude. I can’t imagine her popping pills in her dressing room – she’s so <em>together</em>. Helped along by a very tight band, her show is professional and polished but, at the same time, enormous fun. Polite to a tee, she’s complimentary about Cambridge and even thanks the guitar tech who dashes onstage between every number for keeping her strung and tuned.<br /><br />One song, ‘Footballer’s Wife’, shows her distaste for reality TV and instant celebrity. She introduces it with a little homily about the importance of hard work. At just 23, with a big-selling debut album behind her and a European stadium tour in prospect, she’s proud to have got where she is by her own efforts, not somebody else’s.<br /><br />She recalls performing ‘This Pretty Face’ on Swiss TV in the middle of a beauty pageant. Macdonald couldn’t keep a straight face, because the song is saying the exact opposite: never judge by appearances.<br /><br />For those of us who discovered her through two irresistibly catchy singles, ‘Mr Rock &amp; Roll’ and ‘This Is The Life’, there’s more of the same: the chance for a big singalong on new songs like ‘Don’t Tell Me That It’s Over’ and ‘Love Love’. With their expansive choruses, these are typical Macdonald territory. After all that, the main set ends reflectively with ‘What Happiness Means To Me’. Lured back for encores, she rounds off the night with a tempestuous version of ‘Let’s Start A Band’.<br /><br />Support comes from The Roads, a London-based quartet, all sisters. Enjoyable, if somewhat too demure for Macdonald’s audience.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[Photo taken at the event by Jean-Luc Benazet. Used with permission.]</span></div></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com3